[sclug] LVM & 2Tb limit

[Martin Summers]

Hello,

Redhat Enterprise tends to have 2.6 kernel functionality back ported into 2.4, so you *should* be OK. It would be worth checking in the docs for confirmation on this as I am only 50 % sure. The largest I have ever done is 1.5 TB on Linux - this worked fine until it went wrong one day...

My experience of large single volumes on linux are that if you ever have a bad power failure or a situation where the machine crashes badly, having to fix the filesystem will take forever (regardless of if it is journaled or not) It took me 3 days non stop to fix my filesystem on 1.5 TB, and even then, I had corrupt files. Restoring from backup was the only thing to do. On a filesystem that size, it may not be feasible to fsck it in a "reasonable" amount of time (depending on what you call "reasonable". If you can break it down into smaller partitions, you will be glad of it if you are ever in this unfortunate positon (I speak from experience here !)
Also, backing up a filesystem that large is going to take time......

I guess that's my two-penneth worth ;-)

-Martin Summers



-----Original Message-----
From: sclug-bounces at sclug.org.uk [mailto:sclug-bounces at sclug.org.uk]On
Behalf Of Alan Pearson
Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2005 4:29 PM
To: sclug at sclug.org.uk
Subject: [sclug] LVM & 2Tb limit


Hi Guys

Question

I've read that kernel 2.4 suffers from a 2 TB limitation on Block 
devices.
I need to create a logical volume of around 12TB on a RHEL 3.0 system, 
which also runs kernel 2.4 (albeit a RH kernel).

Has anyone any ideas if this is possible ?
Is this limitation eliminated in kernel 2.6 / LVM 2?

Also is there any disadvantage to having such a large filesystem (I'm 
going with reiserfs (I don't want to hear about ext3 !))
The files that are stored there will be GBs in size so I'm not imaging 
hundreds of thousands of files.

Any help appreciated.

Thanks
AlanP

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